Tag Archives: terry kawashima

There is a joke that my friend once told. “How do you blind an Asian?” she asked, to which we gave her a confused look. She grinned and answered, “With dental floss!” All of us got the joke right away and I’m guessing you did too. Almond shape eyes that almost appear to be tiny slits on the face when smiling is one of the stereotypical facial characteristics plastered on Asians. We use these visual characteristics to label people into different racial category at a glance, thus it can be said that race is not only socially constructed like many scholars say but race is also visually constructed.

In her article “Seeing Faces, Making Races: Challenging Visual Tropes of Racial Difference”, Terry Kawashima mentions that Sailor Moon looks “white” to some viewers and “Japanese” to others. She concludes that the reason why this is the case is because “we are culturally conditioned to read visual images in specific racialized ways” (Kawashima 2002, p.161). In other words, Sailor Moon looks just as “white” as she does “Japanese” and how we interpret her is based on our own cultural context.

Though, the fact that some people read Sailor Moon as white is understandable considering that her character design consists of the Western trademark blonde hair and blue eyes. Even in an anime where the hair and eye colors of the characters ranges from one end of the color spectrum to the other, when a Western character is put on the screen more than half the time he or she will have that exact hair and eye color combination. Take for example, the Western characters from Free! Eternal Summer. The Japanese characters have hair colors ranging from yellow to black, but all the Western character hair colors are limited to different shades of yellow and brown. How about comparing the facial features of Alex Louis Armstrong to Ling Yao from Fullmetal Alchemist? Isn’t it clear that Armstrong is drawn to represent your typical Western face and Ling as Asian? Why are we so fixated on these stereotypical appearances that they are also reflected in art and media?

Kawashima says that “certain features are highlighted and others suppressed or ignored to ensure a coherent result” (2002, p.164). Perhaps this highlighting of specific facial features and simplifying them is true. Perhaps this is the reason why we tend to say “they all look alike” when we talk about people from different races. I have lost count of the number of times when my friends look at a Korean idol group and say that they can’t tell the members apart. “The other race affect” says that we can recognize diversity in our own race but not with others. Daniel Levin, a cognitive psychologist at Kent State University, says that “the problem is not that we can’t code the details of cross-race faces—it’s that we don’t.”

Let’s face it, despite the fact that we know that these stereotypes exists some of us, for example, don’t like being told that all East Asians look the same. So just because “we don’t” doesn’t meant that we can’t try.

I’m sure you’ve seen them at one point in time, displayed along the aisle shelves of drugstores in cultural and “racial” melting pots like the United States—makeup and hair products marketed to “enhance” and “accentuate” the “natural” features of certain races. However, there is no one physical trait that all members of a racial group share; all “Blacks” do not have x amount of melanin in their skin, all “Asians” do not have almond-shaped eyes with a curvature of y, and all “Japanese” do not have hair with a diameter of z. So how is it we learn to associate, define, and read physical traits and racial categories?

Let’s see this process in action. Try to imagine a “Black” person. Next, imagine a “White” person. Okay, now imagine a “Japanese” person. How did you draw them? What features do they have? How did you know what features to give each “race”? We learn to expect the way people look like based on our encounters in the social world- through interactions in our daily lives and through popular media representations of “races”. Through this cultural learning process, we internalize how to code race and categorize individuals based on what we think they should and should not look like compared to other “races”.

Terry Kawashima illustrated this social phenomenon using the racial “ambiguity” of characters from Japanese shojo manga. Will a manga character with a small mouth, straight tall but small nose, large “saucer” eyes, and blond hair be recognized as “Japanese” or “White”? According to Kawashima, American audiences tended to view this character as “White” because it had blond hair, while Japanese audiences tended to view this same character as “Japanese” because of its small mouth and nose. Americans were surprised that this character is also thought of as “Japanese” because Americans tend to learn that blond hair is a central indicator of “Whiteness”, while Japanese audiences tend to learn that blond hair does not necessarily indicate being “White” in combination with other telling features of “Japanese-ness”. Different cultures and societies have their own set of rules and criteria for defining and categorizing “races”, which accounts for the differences in the way American and Japanese audiences code the character. We are taught what traits define which races, and what races should or shouldn’t have which traits.

I remember when I was a child growing up the United States, and children would mock Chinese people (this term was all-encompassing to mean anyone of East-Asian “descent”), by pulling the outer corners of their eyes towards their ears to form a more almond-looking shape, and yell “ching-chong” to imitate the “Asian” language. While both my parents and I identify as “White” and are viewed by society as “White”, I remember thinking that both my mother and many other of my “white” acquaintances also had smaller, almond-shaped eyes, so I did not understand why “almond eyes” were a trait associated with “Asian-ness”. As I entered high school and became more aware of and interested in Japanese popular culture, I began to notice differences in the way “Asian-ness” or “Japanese-ness” were represented in the media. When I showed pictures of the Japanese pop singer Ayumi Hamasaki to my peers, they said her “orange” hair was weird and here eyes were too “big”; in other words, they came to the conclusion she was trying to be “White”, when she should otherwise be accentuating her “Asian” features because she is racially perceived as “Asian”.

Famous Japanese pop singer Ayumi Hamasaki

In comparing Japanese media representations of Ayumi Hamasaki to images of Lucy Liu, who was embraced by American popular media and described by Kawashima, there are noticeable differences in the appearances of these women. Ayumi Hamasaki’s makeup gives her eyes a large and rounded appearance, while Lucy Liu’s makeup leaves her eyes in an “almond” shape- just as “Asians” are expected to look by American audiences. You may speculate that Ayumi Hamasaki enlarges and thus in-authenticates her eyes using makeup techniques or has undergone plastic surgery, but in arguing so, you are giving in to socialization processes and assuming that “natural” Asian eyes are almond-shaped, and therefore cannot “naturally” be “saucer shaped”.

Lucy Liu, who was generally embraced by American popular media

This blog is not attempting to define or identify any defining physical characteristics of each race; race is in the eye of the beholder- what is authentic, what is natural. Women are often told they should accentuate their natural features—follow the natural curves of your face when contouring, play up your lips if they are naturally plump, and so forth, but this becomes a problem when “naturalness” and “authenticity” are racially coded. If you are “White”, makeup leaving you with deep-set eyes and medium-high cheek bones is viewed “authentic”; if you are “Asian”, any makeup that does not render your eyes in an “almond” shape is “inauthentic”. If there are many physical variations of the same features among members of the same “race”, why does “natural” makeup for each race only portray one set of variation of physical features?

I will be sure to think of Kawashima’s work, the next time I hear someone say “It’s such a waste that he/she is hiding his/her “natural White/Asian/Black/Brown” features”. There are no physical traits “natural” or essential to any one race, so why should one race have just one “natural” or “authentic” form of makeup and beauty alteration? We must re-examine the innate racialization of “natural” beauty.

I have been a big fan of Manga and Anime for as long as I can remember. I always admired how the Japanese style of drawing cartoon characters was different from that of popular western comics and animations. The characters in Manga and Anime have always stood out because they are unique. That is, many of them have exaggerated and flamboyant features and this always stood out for me and many other fans alike. Never did it ever occur to me that the way the Japanese creators illustrate their artistic work had significance on how race and ethnicity is viewed or construed in Japan.

As I began to read and watch more Manga and Anime, I began to notice how non-Japanese characters (people of color, specifically of African origin) were drawn and represented and many of them had very stereotypical characteristics. This can be seen in their dressing style, behavior, speech patterns and activities they are engaged in. One such character is ChocoLove McDonell (pictured above) from the manga and Anime ‘Shaman King’. Where do I even start with this … His name is CHOCOLOVE!!! The character is an African American who has his hair in an afro, has exaggerated lips and wears an African wrap on the lower half of his body. Ohh and his animal spirit is a Jaguar! Many other non-Japanese characters are as controversial for example Mr. Popo from Dragon Ball and Jynx from pokemon who both appear to be in black face, Staff Officer Black and Killa from Dragon Ball, Bugnug or ‘dark eyes’ from Crying freeman et cetera. The characters mentioned are all African American with the exception of Bugnug (which means Ant-Eater apparently) who is the leader of the Askari (Swahili word to mean soldier) which is an African revolutionary organization. Bugnug is first introduced to Crying Freeman manga readers when she launches a surprise attack on Yō Hinomura who is the main character. She is illustrated to look ‘exotic’. She is beautiful with long curly hair but is muscular and masculine in her behavior. It is impossible to compare her to the other Japanese females in the same manga as they seem more fragile and feminine.

During the battle with Yō Hinomura (Crying Freeman), Bugnug is completely naked and only carries a blade. When she is finally defeated by Yō Hinomura, the two become allies and she later on gets his assistance to defeat a coup d’état in her organization. It seems as though the creators of this manga and anime went all out to display Bugnug’s supposed ‘Africanness’ by naming the character Bugnug which they go on to translate as Ant-Eater, having her fight naked, which I believe represents a kind of primitiveness and then including a coup d’état in her storyline which occurs within her revolutionary organization. So this leaves me to question why some characters of African ancestry are represented in this manner in manga and anime. Do all the people of African ancestry have these characteristics and why have these stereotypes been continuously perpetuated?

When trying to answer these questions, it is important to note that Japan has always been a homogeneous nation and this has created a kind of distance between them and other cultures from many parts of the world. Thus, a lot of what Japanese people know and perceive has been spread through western media which is dominated by America through entertainment, news, music et cetera. In the article ‘What does “American” Mean in Postwar Japan?’ by Yoshimi Shunya (2008) he writes that,

From the late1950’s onward, “America” was distilled as a uniform image with even greater power than before to gain people’s hearts. ..Until the early 1950’s the word “America” was simply invoked as a model to be emulated… “America” also came to be associated with the “pop-culture” of Japanese youth. As “America” became less direct, more mediated, and increasingly confined to images, it conversely became more interiorized and its effect on people’s consciousness became deep. (Yoshimi Shunya, 2008)

This exposure has been both positive and negative in that it has opened up Japan to other cultures and has made the Japanese people more aware of the differences between their cultures, traditions and those of people from other parts of the world but has also promoted the adoption of negative stereotypes thus most of what the Japanese know are imagined racial distinctions that have been created and promoted by the western media.

As I come to the end of this blog post, I would like to point out that not all black people are represented stereotypically in some of the Manga and Anime works and some Japanese characters have even been made to have darker skin tones or even display several characteristics that one would categorize as being black. An example that comes to mind is Takenori Akagi from Slam Dunk!

In conclusion, I believe that as Manga and Anime continue to spread and attain wider audiences, their popularity will help raise awareness on how race and ethnicity is viewed in different parts of the world and this will in turn create a better understanding of these different cultures and ethnicities.

In the section “Does Sailor Moon ‘look white’?” of Terry Kawashima’s article “Seeing Faces, Making Races: Challenging Visual Tropes of Racial Difference”, Kawashima argues that facial features and skin color commonly found in the Shojo Manga characters should be understood as “an assertion of a certain kind of aesthetic promoted in contemporary Japan”. Whiteness, as well as those body features (like smallish noses, mouths, and round faces), is read as a standard of beauty. Those elements are not necessarily characteristics of the white. The process of “Japanizing” of “white” figures and “whitening” of Japanese figures occurs simultaneously. The white or the westerners spread their value

One of the contemporary results for a western-dominated world setting up the standard of beauty is just as what Terry mentioned in the next part of her article, “self-alteration” of Japanese. Japanese consumers purchase products to make themselves look white. Seeking whiteness became a fashion and more economic value was created through the idea of being whiter. However, this is definitely not just a contemporary phenomenon. Historically, there are more serious issues which shares similarities with the spreading aesthetic of seeking whiteness.

The example of the “Hadairo” (Skin Color) crayons, which the color of the “Hadairo” crayons selling in Japanese market is actually whiter than the color of Japanese. Japanese children also tend to paint the skin of Japanese with a brighter color, which reminds me of the famous Clark doll experiment conducted by Dr. Kenneth Clark and his wife. The experiment was conducted under the social context of racial segregation in 1954. During the period of racial segregation, whites were separated from African Americans in terms of various social facilities or services such as education, transportation, etc. As segregation and discrimination against African Americans went on, the social image of African Americans was constructed as inferior to whites. Under the legal doctrine of “separate but equal” admitted by the U.S Supreme Court, the segregation was justified. The experiment was a key evidence to show the negative influence of segregation to the children.

Clark Doll Experiment

The construction of the image of a certain race might be through segregation. In the experiment, Dr. Clark showed one white doll and one black doll to African American children and asked them the following questions in such order:

“Show me the doll that you like best or that you’d like to play with,”

“Show me the doll that is the ‘nice’ doll,”

“Show me the doll that looks ‘bad’,”

“Give me the doll that looks like a white child,”

“Give me the doll that looks like a colored child,”

“Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child,”

“Give me the doll that looks like you.”

As a result, most of the black children regarded the black doll as bad one and surprisingly 44 percent of the African American children said that the white doll looked like them. This is indeed similar as the Hadairo crayon case. Both Japanese and black children’s mindset of beauty are influenced and set by the dominant white race.

It is natural for a race with dominant power over other races to create a better self-image and set up the standard of beauty in any historic period. This might be achieved through different methods. In case of the Clark doll experiment, this was achieved through racial segregation. In the modern version, it was through globalization and mass media. Personally I feel that the phenomenon may lead to one possible conclusion: The standard of beauty changes all the time according to the global power balance and there are always new methods to spread those values. I strongly believe that this is an ever-lasting phenomenon.

For more information about the racial segregation and Clark Doll Experiment, I would like to recommend the movie, Separate But Equal.

Manga are a topic that has been well-researched in Japanese Studies. However, when it comes to racial identity, we can see strong wonders about the racial identity found in the manga characters. On the one hand, if you search on the internet the question in English “Do Manga look like white people”, you have 14,000,000 results. On the other hand, if we do the same search in Japanese “漫画キャラクターは白人っぽい“, you only get 736,000 results and it is mainly a translation on the question asked by foreigners.

Terry Kawashima (2002), in her essay “Seeing Faces, Making Races: Challenging Visual Tropes of Racial Difference,” argues that the manga characters are mainly based on whiteness’ particularities and they influence the young women when it comes to the concept of beauty. According to her, the manga readers had been “culturally conditioned to read visual images in specific racialized ways that privilege certain cues at the expense of others and lead to an over determined conclusion” and highlight the issues on how “race” is a social constructed category.

It is true that media and films had been marking differences between characters from different countries or social background through racial and social features that had left stigmas in our observation of the World. However, Manga’s drawing is less likely to be considered as a description of “whiteness” characteristics. One the manga’s particularity is the notion of 無国籍 or literally “a country-neutral quality” (Iwabuchi, 2002) which defines manga characters having no any race attributed to them. Koichi Iwabuchi (2002) in his researches calls this particularity as “odorless”: It has not specific features and it is one of the reasons why manga are successful abroad. The most common examples are Hello Kitty and Mario in the Nintendo’s video games.

So why do we see specific racial features in these “odorless” characters? It is mainly because of our personal representation of racial differences. These differences are called “markedness” by Matt Thorn (2004), we used our own culture and features of our own personal experiences to identify the character’s race. For example, look at a manga character with blond hair and blue eyes who is eating a bowl of rice with chopsticks. Where a French person will see a French personage because of its physical features and because he is himself French, the Japanese will see a Japanese person because this he/she is eating a bowl of rice with chopsticks.

It is undeniable that we mark manga characters with racial features which we encountered in our personal life. In this context, it is less likely that Japanese people also see white people in the manga they read. What they must see is a typical Japanese person. It is then difficult to confirm Terry Kawashima’s argument on the “white privileging” perception we may see in manga. Thinking that Japanese readers see white people in manga would imply a sentiment of inferiority of the Japanese community toward the “white race”. If we follow this idea, we fall into a generalization of the supremacy of whiteness in our current society and destroy the main principle of manga’s ideology neutral racial or “無国籍”. However, when it comes to racial stereotypes in manga characters, we actually reach another important issue on racial representations in Mass Media and we should put more attention on this subject.

What is beauty in Japan and what race do Japanese regard themselves? In “Seeing Faces, Making Races: Challenging Visual Tropes of Racial Difference in Japan,” Terry Kawashima mentions that Japanese people have used Westerners as a model of beauty, with Westerners’ taller noses, bigger eyes, and blond hair. Thus, Japanese women do makeup to make their eyes look bigger and dye their hair in brighter colors. Yet, being Japanese, I myself do not do my makeup while thinking about to wanting to look like Westerners. From this, Japanese are not putting Westerner as a model of beauty, yet we are brainwashed and affected since we are young children.

How are Japanese people affected and brainwashed? Considering Japanese manga or animation, most characters have white skin with colored hair. If this characters are seen by foreigners, it is natural for them to consider why ‘white’ characters are are used in Japanese animations. Although Japanese children have seen these images since they were young, they do not feel uncomfortable or wonder why the characters have different colored skin than they do. From this, it could be said that media in Japan is constructing citizens to have Westerners as a role model and also to make the citizens feel similar to Westerners.

Yet, why would media do such a thing? In society, there always are classifications in race, even when we are not aware of them. So, from looking at the world, from Japanese aspect, Westerners have been superior since the end of World War II. This is making Japanese people treat Westerners as a role model, and also by media making Japanese people think similar and familiar with westerners, it makes Japanese consider themselves similar to Westerners. When we watch cartoons made in other countries and see a character that has black hair, small eyes and short height, I guess some Japanese people might have experienced regard that character as Chinese even wearing kimono or other Japanese traditional clothes. I consider this is coming from the classification and unconsciousness of superiority and inferiority.

To conclude, Japanese are regarding Westerners as beauty due to the effects of exposure to the media since a young age, and the unconsciousness of classification is still affecting our ideas. Thus, Japanese people regard their race as Japanese, yet in some point, they have some kind of similarity to Westerners and Western stays as the model of beauty in Japan.

There have been controversial debates going on about why characters in Japanese manga have huge eyes. Do such huge eyes in Manga mean that Japanese people are craving for them?

Having read Terry Kawashima’s piece, “Seeing Faces, Making Races: Challenging Visual tropes of Racial Differences”, I also started wondering why the eyes of characters in Japanese manga are big, even though I had never strongly questioned that before. Readers from Western countries might have wondered about the looks of characters in Manga because the characters’ features are similar to the features Caucasians have, including round eyes or blond hair.

Thinking about the real purpose of this kind of trend from the perspective of Japanese myself, I would say that is not because Japanese strongly desire to get big eyes like Caucasians, but rather because big eyes are one of the most important techniques to express characters’ minds and make it easier for readers to observe its minute movements, since only iconography and visual languages are used to let readers read what characters are thinking. Therefore readers can easily read characters’ thoughts by looking at their facial expressions with unique movements of their eyes.

There is a proverb “目は口ほどにものを言う” ,meaning that “the eyes are the window of the mind”, or “the eyes say more than the mouth” in English. This thinking also makes us consent to the trend of large eyes in Japanese Manga. Making up for sounds or animation which enable us to understand situations and feelings of characters more easily, various movements of eyes are also a center tool for writers as well as for readers. Using large eyes can be considered as one of the essential tools or techniques to add affluent expressions on characters. Inspired by Disney cartoons, Osamu Tezuka known as a talented Japanese manga writer, also started using that technique in order to emphasize greater expressions of characters. His works then have been the basis for all manga today. In spite of the fact that the way of drawing characters was also influenced from the West, a reason is not always the strong desire of Japanese towards Caucasians, but rather Japanese manga writers adopt the Western styles into their drawings.

I am always amazed by that technique when reading manga since characters with various expressions on eyes give plenty of punches and enable me to empathize with the manga world in which only visual languages and pictures are used. Japanese writers uniquely use huge eyes as a technique to add greater emotions on characters, which is still putting many manga fans from all over the world into a trance today.

Discrimination between different ethnic groups is commonly reported throughout the world. Not to mention the racism against Afro-Americans in US, but also discriminations against Hafu people in Japan, unfair treatment against southeastern brides who came to Korea for marriage, etc. With no doubt such phenomena are spread widely over the world. Professor Terry Kawashima states that race works through several visual readings, or interpretations of the physical differences of a person. However I would like to raise a question of whether racism really exists. Is what we call racism really an act of discriminating other groups of people because of their physical looks? Or is there something else, some other factors that affects us but are hidden beneath the word racism?

In 1994, there was a systematic massacre of minority ethnic groups by major ethnic groups. The Hutu, a majority ethnic group in Rwanda, attacked the Tutsi, a minority group. Triggered by death of the president, Hutus started killing every Tutsi in sight. As a result, at least 500,000 people were killed. The point here is that in external physical appearance, the Hutu and the Tutsi had no difference at all. They all looked like the same black people. However Hutu accused them of being “different”. This may mean different genetics, but it doesn’t make sense since it is widely known that two members of the same ethnic group can be just as different genetically as two people from different ethnic groups. Then in this case, it is safe to say that physical racism was just an official reason, and the true reason mostly lied in the economic structure of Rwanda. The Tutsi monopolized most of Rwanda’s economy while Hutu had very little in it and was unhappy with the fact.

The history of mankind has been a continuation of conflicts, like constant war. Whether it is large or small, there was always war among different groups. The cause varies; it could be a fight for ideology, conflict over economic benefits, or even basic survival itself. However when people mention the difference in ethnicity as a cause of war, I seriously doubt it. It is not the difference that causes conflicts between ethnic groups, but it is rather the way we interpret it. All those conflicts claiming that were triggered by different ethnicities, like the case in Rwanda, actually has other reasons hidden behind the mask of racism. So come to think about it, maybe there isn’t any “true racism”, in which one is hostile to the other for the sole reason of being different, in the world. I believe that there is always something else.